Kinshuk Vasisht

Rose Sathyanathan, Kinshuk Vasisht, Danish Pruthi

Millions of users turn to AI models for their information needs. It is conceivable that a large number of user queries contain assumptions that may be factually inaccurate. Prior work notes that large language models (LLMs) often fail to challenge such erroneous assumptions, and can reinforce users' misinformed opinions. However, given the recent advances, especially in model's reasoning capabilities, we revisit whether large reasoning models (LRMs) can reason about the underlying assumptions and respond to user queries appropriately. We construct queries with varying degrees of presuppositions spanning health, science, and general knowledge, and use it to evaluate several widely-deployed models When compared to non-reasoning models, we find that reasoning models achieve a slightly higher accuracy (2-11%), but they still fail to challenge a large fraction (26-42%) of false presuppositions. Further, reasoning models remain susceptible to how strongly the presupposition is expressed.

Kirti Bhagat, Kinshuk Vasisht, Danish Pruthi

While a large body of work inspects language models for biases concerning gender, race, occupation and religion, biases of geographical nature are relatively less explored. Some recent studies benchmark the degree to which large language models encode geospatial knowledge. However, the impact of the encoded geographical knowledge (or lack thereof) on real-world applications has not been documented. In this work, we examine large language models for two common scenarios that require geographical knowledge: (a) travel recommendations and (b) geo-anchored story generation. Specifically, we study five popular language models, and across about $100$K travel requests, and $200$K story generations, we observe that travel recommendations corresponding to poorer countries are less unique with fewer location references, and stories from these regions more often convey emotions of hardship and sadness compared to those from wealthier nations.

Kinshuk Vasisht, Balaji Ganesan, Vikas Kumar et al.

Knowledge infusion is a promising method for enhancing Large Language Models for domain-specific NLP tasks rather than pre-training models over large data from scratch. These augmented LLMs typically depend on additional pre-training or knowledge prompts from an existing knowledge graph, which is impractical in many applications. In contrast, knowledge infusion directly from relevant documents is more generalisable and alleviates the need for structured knowledge graphs while also being useful for entities that are usually not found in any knowledge graph. With this motivation, we propose a simple yet generalisable approach for knowledge infusion by generating prompts from the context in the input text. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our approach which we evaluate by probing the fine-tuned LLMs.

Kinshuk Vasisht, Navreet Kaur, Danish Pruthi · uw

To deploy language models safely, it is crucial that they abstain from responding to inappropriate requests. Several prior studies test the safety promises of models based on their effectiveness in blocking malicious requests. In this work, we focus on evaluating the underlying techniques that cause models to abstain. We create SELECT, a benchmark derived from a set of benign concepts (e.g., "rivers") from a knowledge graph. Focusing on benign concepts isolates the effect of safety training, and grounding these concepts in a knowledge graph allows us to study the generalization and specificity of abstention techniques. Using SELECT, we benchmark different abstention techniques over six open-weight and closed-source models. We find that the examined techniques indeed cause models to abstain with over $80\%$ abstention rates. However, these techniques are not as effective for descendants of the target concepts, where abstention rates drop by $19\%$. We also characterize the generalization-specificity trade-offs for different techniques. Overall, no single technique is invariably better than others, and our findings inform practitioners of the various trade-offs involved.